A draft specification for IRIDIUM (by alaric)

As discussed in my previous post, I think it's lame that we use TCP for everything and think we could do much better!. Here's my concrete proposal for IRIDIUM, a protocol that I think could be a great improvement:

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Debugging poor home wifi at the Snell-Pym residence (by alaric)

So, we have a fairly complicated network at home - the Snell-Pym Family Mainframe has a dedicated DSL link with a static IP for hosting various Internet-facing things, as well as providing internal services to the home LAN. The home LAN has the usual mix of desktop computers, the laser printer, and two wireless APs for mobile devices to connect to - one in the house and one in the workshop, because one can't get a good signal to both locations. And there's a separate infrastructure LAN for systems control and monitoring.

Now, we've often had on-and-off poor connectivity on the wifi in the house; this used to happen sporadically, usually for around a day, then just get better. The wifi signal strength would remain good, but packet loss was high (10-20%) so stuff just didn't work very well. TCP is poor at high packet loss; it's OK once a connection is open, but packet loss during the initial SYN/SYNACK/ACK handshake causes it to take a long time to retry on most implementations.

I went looking for interfering networks (we live in a pretty wifi-dense urban area) using an app called "Wifi Analyzer" on my Android phone, and it showed a strange network, always on the same channel as the house wifi (as in, if I changed the channel, it would move too). The network never had a name, and the signal strength was about the same as the house wifi; sometimes a bit stronger, sometimes a bit weaker. Read more »

Insomnia (by alaric)

There's something about the combination of having spent many weeks in a row without more than the odd half-hour here and there to myself (time when I get to do whatever I like, rather than merely choosing which of the list of things I need to get done urgently I will do next, or just having no choice at all), and knowing I need to get up even earlier the next morning than usual (to dive straight into a long day of scheduled activities), that makes it very, very, hard for me to sleep.

So, although I got to bed in good time for somebody who has to wake up at six o'clock, I have given up laying there staring at the ceiling, and come down to eat some more food (I get the munchies past midnight), read my book without disturbing Sarah with my bedside light, and potter on my laptop. I need to be up in five hours, so hopefully emptying my brain of whirling thoughts will enable me to sleep.

There's lots of things I want to do. Even though it's something I need to get done by a deadline, I'm actually enthusiastic about continuing the project I was working on today; making an enclosure for our chickens. This is necessary for us to be able to go away from the house for more than one night, which is something we want to do over Christmas; thus the deadline.

Three of the edges of the enclosure will be built onto existing walls or woodwork, but one of them needs to cut across some ground, so I've dug a trench across said bit of ground, laid an old concrete lintel and some concrete blocks in the trench after levelling the base with ballast, and then mixed and rammed concrete around them. When I next get to work on it, I'll mix up a large batch of concrete and use it to level the surface neatly (and then ram any left-overs into remaining gaps) to just below the level of the soil, then lay a row of engineering bricks (frog down) on a mortar bed on top of that in order to make a foundation that I can screw a wooden batten to. With that done, and some battens screwed into the tops of existing walls that don't already have woodwork on, I'll be able to build the frame of the enclosure (including a door), then attach fox-proof mesh to it, and our chickens will have a new home they can run around in safely.

Thinking about how I'm going to lay the next batch of concrete in a nice level run, working around the fact that I only have a short spirit level by placing a long piece of wood in there and levelling it with wedges and then using it as a reference to level the concrete to, has been one of the things running around in my head this evening.

Another has been the next steps from last Friday, when I had a fascinating meeting with a bunch of interesting people in the information security world. You see, I've always been interested in the foundation technologies upon which we build software, such as storage management, distributed computing, parallel computing, programming languages, operating systems, standard libraries, fault tolerance, and security. I was lucky enough to find a way into the world of database development a few years ago, which (with a move to a company that produces software to run SQL queries across a cluster) has broadened to cover storage management, distribution, parallelism, AND programming languages. So imagine my delight when said company starts to develop the security features in the product, and I can get involved in that; and even more when (through old contacts) I'm invited to the inaugural meeting of a prestigious group of peopled interested in security. That landed me an invite to the second meeting (chaired by an actual Lord, and held in the House of Lords!), the highlight of which was of course getting to talk to the participants after the presentations. I found out about the Global Identity Foundation, who are working pn standardising the kind of pseudonymous identity framework I have previous pined for; I'm going to see if I can find a way to get more involved in that. But I need to do a lot of reading-up on the organisations and people involved in this stuff, and figuring out how I can contribute to it with my time and money restrictions.

I'd really like to have some quiet time to work on my secret fiction project, too. And I want to investigate Ugarit bugs. Some bugs in the Chicken Scheme system have been found and fixed lately, so I need to re-test all these bugs to see if any of the more mysterious ones were artefacts of that. I'm in a bit of a vicious circle with that; the longer it is since I've been tinkering with the Ugarit internals, the longer it'll take me to get back into it, and the more nervous I feel about doing so. I think I might need to pick off some lighter bit of work with good rewards (adding a new feature, say) and handle that first, to get back into the swing of things. Either way, I'll need a good solid day to dig into it all again; trying to assemble that from sporadic hours just won't cut it.

I'm still mulling over issues in the design of ARGON. Right now I'm reading a book on handling updates to logical databases - adding new facts to them, and handling the conflicts when the new facts contradict older ones, in order to produce a new state of the database where the new fact is now true, but no contradictions remain. I need to work this out to settle on a final semantics for CARBON, which will be required to implement distributed storage of knowledge within TUNGSTEN. I need a semantics that can converge towards a consensus on the final state of the system, despite interruptions in internal network connectivity within the cluster causing updates to arrive in different orders in different places; doing that efficiently is, well, easier said than done.

I really want to finish rebuilding my furnace, which I hoped to get done this Summer, but I'm still assembling the structural supports for it. I've made a mould to cast shaped refractory bricks for the lining of the furnace, but I've yet to mix up the heatproof insulating material the bricks need to be made out of and start casting the bricks, as I still need to work out how I'll form the tuyere.

I want to get Ethernet cabled to my workshop, because currently I don't have a proper place for working on my laptop; I have to do it on the sofa in the lounge to be within range of the wifi, which isn't very ergonomic, doesn't give me access to my external screens, and is prone to interruption by children. I find it very motivating to be in "my space", too; the computer desk in the workshop is all set up the way I like it. And just for fun, I'd like to rig the workshop with computer-controlled sensors and gizmos (that kind of thing is a childhood dream of mine...).

This past year, I've tried booking two weekend days a month for my projects, in our shared calendar. This worked well at the start of the year, with projects such as the workshop ladder and eaves proceeding well, but it started to falter around the Summer when we got really busy with festivals and the like. I started having to fit half-days in around other things, which meant spending too much time getting started and clearing up compared to actually getting things done, so my morale faltered; and with so much other stuff on, I've been increasingly inclined to spend my free time just relaxing rather than getting anything done. On a couple of occasions I've tried taking a week off work to pursue my projects, but I then feel guilty about it and start allocating days to spending more time with the children or tidying the house, and before I know it, five days off becomes one day of actual project work. I need to stop feeling guilty about taking time to do the things I enjoy, because if I don't, I'll be too tired and miserable to do a good job of the things I should be doing! And rather than booking my monthly project days around other stuff that's going on, next year I'm going to mark out my two days each month in advance, and then move them elsewhere in the month if Sarah needs me to do something on that particular day, to decrease the chance of ending up having to scrape together half-days around the month (or to skip project days entirely, as I ended up doing last month). I feel awful about saying I'm going to spend days doing what I feel like doing rather than the things the rest of my family need me to drive them to, but if I don't, I think I'm going to fall apart!

Now... off and on I've spent forty minutes writing this blog post. So with my whirling thoughts dumped out, I'm going to go back to bed and see if I can sleep this time around. Wish me luck!

Is information security good? (by alaric)

One of the interesting things to have come from Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents is that the American National Security Agency has been working to introduce flaws into the design and implementation of security technologies, in order to make it easier for them to break said security for their own ends.

There's been a lot of outrage about that. The argument for it is that the ready availability of strong security technology makes it easier for bad folks to conceal their crimes (and, worse, conceal the fact that they are planning such crimes, so they cannot be stopped in advance), so the NSA is right in acting to make sure people don't have strong security technology. However, even if we can trust the NSA (and that is far from certain) such vulnerabilities can be found by people we certainly can't trust: "cyber-criminals" intent on stealing our credit card details in order to rob us of our money, commercial competitors looking for strategic advantage, and so on.

There are also deeper issues that have been raised; this means that the NSA is covertly working to sabotage the products of US companies. Should they be allowed to do that? Can those companies now sue them for damages?

But I think that, at the heart of the debate over this, is an even deeper issue.

We have the NSA - the part of the US government officially responsible for information security - acting to subvert the information security available to US individuals and companies, on the grounds that it is harmful to the public if they have strong security. While on the other hand, we have individuals and companies striving for better security; working to make more secure products, choosing products that claim to provide security benefits, and so on.

This shows, to me, that there's a big unresolved question that US society as a whole - government and non-government together - needs to ask themselves: Is information security good? The government's official position seems to be that information security is harmful, as it makes it harder to provide a more general notion of security that is threatened by criminals, foreign governments, and terrorists; while everyone else's position seems to be that information security is good because they don't want information criminals and foreign governments stealing their secrets (terrorists don't seem to have cottoned to this trick yet) - and, maybe, because they don't want the government knowing ("stealing" is a contentious term here, as the government gets to define what "stealing" is) their secrets, too.

So before they can really debate whether the NSA's actions are justified or not, I think the US needs to step back and look at the bigger question: Should information security be a right, or not? If not, then they should just use legislation to stop companies and people from wasting resources trying to achieve it while other resources are being spent subverting it so they only receive an illusion thereof. That's just plain inefficient. And if information security is deemed good, then the NSA should be prevented from subverting it, and refocus its efforts on ways of doing its job without being able to break encryption; traffic analysis, meta-data analysis, exploiting specific installations of security systems where a threat is suspected, and so on are all time-honoured mechanisms that work even against well-educated adversaries that use encryption systems that the NSA hasn't been able to subvert.

Privacy (by alaric)

I have a looser attitude towards privacy than most people, but I have began to reconsider that lately.

Generally, I believed (and still do) that anything I do in public is pretty much exempt from privacy. I have no privacy objection to pervasive CCTV, because if I do anything in a public place, somebody could be watching me anyway. The fact that my enemies can now just consult massive archives of CCTV to find me rather than having to get somebody to follow me around isn't, in my view, a huge deal. Indeed, I quite like the idea of sousveillance, having my own recording of what happens around me. It might be inappropriate to be doing that in circumstances that the people around me consider "private", so I'd turn it off for their comfort when it seemed right to do so, but I would still assume that anything I do in the presence of other people is basically recorded to some extent - after all, it's in their memory, at least!

Likewise with monitoring my network traffic at my ISP; I have never had any illusion of privacy there. I encrypt traffic that matters, and accept that the existence and destination/origin of encrypted traffic might be used by my enemies for traffic analysis.

So, I didn't really have any objections to mass surveillance; I had far more objection to the facts that encryption is far from ubiquitous and that information security is not taught in schools. My feeling was that if I can't stop an enemy that doesn't abide by the law (eg, organised criminals) from performing traffic analysis on me, then I can't assume it's private; I can stop them reading my stuff or impersonating me by using public key cryptography, so as long as the law doesn't hinder that, I'm content.

As such, I always wished that Web browsers would just include some kind of unique user ID in the headers, ideally backing it up with a public-key signature of the entire HTTP request. Then we could dispense with session cookies, logins, and even things like OpenID; we'd just authenticate to our browser by supplying the keypair in some browser-dependent way, and then head out onto the secure-single-sign-on Web. There's no loss in privacy compared to the current status quo that people are happy to identify themselves to web sites with email addresses, but it'd be a whole lot simpler for users and for developers. And so that, basically, is the security model I developed for ARGON.

However, I am starting to change my mind.

I've always felt that the "hole" in my approach to privacy was that it depended on my own knowledge of security and my enlightened use of encryption; I wanted sufficient education to bring everyone to that level. Encryption tools are generally a bit clunky, but if more people wanted to use them, that would create demand for better tools (or, more pertinently, better integration into the tools they already use). I felt that if we could just get people to encrypt and sign their communications, and encrypt their storage, and use Tor for things where the cost is worth the protection against traffic analysis, everything would be fine.

However, what has made me start to change my mind is the move towards storing one's data on third-party servers. By which I mean, living your life through Facebook, or letting Google store your email and your documents. People are moving away from having a computer full of their stuff, and communicating semi-directly with their peer's computers, towards letting third parties hold all their stuff. Often third parties they don't pay money to and are in no contract with, so they have little or no leverage over.

It's easy to say that educating people in computer security would make them realise that's a bad idea, but I use many of these services despite not trusting them one bit; I do it because network effects force me to. I could run my own StatusNet server on my own hardware, but instead I use Twitter in order to make it easy for people to communicate with me. I use Facebook because it's the easiest way to keep up with my many peers that do, and sometimes because I am forced to; an organisation I am a member of uses a Facebook group for important announcements. Many people do not publish an email address, but instead require me to contact them through various third-party services.

In effect, we are being forced to hand our information to third parties, and to trust them with it. Variations on these services that store your information on hardware you control exist; variations on those services where you actually pay a service provider to store it on their hardware (in exchange for them looking after maintenance, amortizing up-front costs, and so on for you, and where they are more incentivised to keep your stuff secure so you trust them than to try and find ways to make money out of it) also exist.

But they are not popular, as the big "free" providers have the vast majority of the users, and the value of these services is in all your peers already being on them. Now that worries me.

I'd really like to see more push-back against this. If enough people used decentralised software like Diaspora or ran their own mail systems, then the network effects would benefit those, rather than centralised commercial outfits. Clearly, some large incentive needs to be found to push people over, and an unpleasant transition period where everyone needs to be on both. Eventually, organisations like Facebook, Twitter and Google would find themselves forced to interoperate with the decentralised protocol or lose their place in the market, and then would find themselves having to compete on points such as "privacy" when the same ease-of-use and functionality can be had elsewhere for little cost.

But, we need technical measures as well. Build sensible public-key infrastructure into the core of applications (including Web browsers). Ditch cookies, and replace them with explicit authentication: provide a system of public-key-signing HTTP requests as I suggest, but turn it off by default, and force web servers to request it with a status code, as is already done for HTTP authentication (not that that is used for web applications, alas). Let browsers seamlessly support multiple identities, and when a web site requests identification, let the user choose which identity to use; and then colour the border of the Web page according to the identity in use so they don't forget. And while providing identity management through that (controlled) mechanism, try as hard as possible to remove all other means of identification - don't send headers leaking lots of information about the user-agent and its capabilities and settings, and disallow Javascript from querying that sort of thing. Bundle Tor with browsers, so it can be turned on and off with the click of a button, as part of the "private browsing mode" found in many browsers.

I still don't think there's much point in trying to fix this with making information gathering and retention illegal (the recent PRISM scandals suggest that legitimate authorities will find ways to work around limitations on their information gathering, and organised criminals simply won't give a damn anyway); we need better technology that makes us anonymous by default and pseudonymous when we want to be. But there may be some value in legislation helping to break the stranglehold on the social software market held by big centralised organisations!

I'm updating the ARGON security model to work like this (not that that makes a difference to the Real World, mind...)